interests. The further he pushed the investigation, the more convinced he became. He was dealing for the most part with a group of technical facts, the bearing and weight of which his practical experience had fully equipped him to estimate; and although he was not an engineer his final decision was in every essential respect that of an expert. No better example could be given of his ability to qualify himself for an important job by careful preparation. In order to make his own decision prevail he needed to be an authority, and an authority he be

came.

The fight was begun in the Committee. Throughout the hearings, during which several volumes of testimony was taken, Mr. Hanna was constantly putting questions to the witnesses,— particularly the members of the Canal Commission, — in order to bring out their emphatic preference on engineering grounds for the Panama route — his object being to prepare the mind of the Senators, who might read the testimony, for more light. The Committee itself he did not expect to convince. Its Chairman was Senator Morgan, long the most determined advocate of a Nicaraguan canal, and the majority of its members were already publicly committed in its favor. The real fight was made on the floor of the Senate, where Mr. Hanna as well as other able Senators were using all their personal influence to convert their colleagues to Panama. After a while they felt strong enough to take the aggressive. Senator Spooner offered an amendment to the Hepburn Bill which left nothing of the House measure except its enacting clause. It authorized the President to purchase the franchises and property of the French company for not more than $40,000,000, to secure by treaty with Colombia a canal zone and then to proceed with the construction of the canal. But he was also authorized to fall back on the Nicaraguan route-in case he could not make a satisfactory bargain with the French company or Colombia. This amendment was the idea and work of Senator Spooner, and its submission to the Senate was good tactics. It placed the advocates of the Nicaraguan canal where, considering the weight of expert testimony, they ought to be placed — that is, on the defensive.

The most important speech in favor of the Spooner amend

ment was made by Senator Hanna on June 5 and 6. He had carefully prepared the material for this utterance, but not a word of its actual text. He had before him two sheets of paper, containing twelve or fifteen lines of writing on each; and the majority of these memoranda were not even subject headings. They were merely references to the page numbers of reports and the like. His secretary sat behind, ready with some fifteen books and pamphlets, quotations from which the speaker intended to use. Backed up by this material he talked to the whole Senate just as he had already talked to many Senators in person explaining in a conversational way the reasons which made the Panama route more desirable. He spoke on the first day for over two hours, until his knees gave out, and on the day following he concluded with a somewhat shorter additional argument. On June 18, the day before the vote was taken, he supplemented his first speech with a brief but very cogent plea for the Panama route.

A reading of Senator Hanna's Panama speech is sufficient to account for its remarkable effect. It is at once unmistakably sincere and really authoritative. With one exception he did not and could not advance any novel arguments in favor of Panama - although that exception is very important. It consisted of a large number of letters from the sailing masters of ocean-going ships, which he had solicited and obtained, and which testified unanimously and emphatically to the superiority of the shorter and straighter Panama Canal from the point of view of a practical navigator. But for the most part he could only repeat arguments which had already been advanced by engineers. What he did do was to present these arguments skilfully, to bring out and emphasize the substantially unanimous consensus of engineering authority on one side, and to discuss lucidly those phases of the subject with which his own experience had made him familiar. Senator Hanna's speech, as compared with the many long and dreary harangues which had been delivered in the Senate during the years of discussion of an interoceanic canal, produces a veritable sensation of candor, relevance, personal knowledge and reality.

The speech obtained an enormous success. His friends all

congratulated Lim, and Lundreds of copies were demanded of Lim as soon as it was printed in the Record Senator Orville Platt, a man of some experience, said that it was the most effective address which had been made in the Senate during his career. All observers testify that it actually changed votes. Up to the time of its delivery the outlook was very dubious. Thereafter the prospect of a favorable vote very much improved. Senator Frye states that after a lifelong public advocacy of the Nicaragua route, Mr. Hanna converted him to its rival. He told his friend that he was voting not for a Panama but for a Hannama canal. He asserted emphatically that Mr. Hanna, far more than any other single man, was responsible for the conversion of Congress and the country to Panama. It is almost unnecessary to add that the public speech was supplemented by vigorous private canvassing. The opinion of every Senator was learned, and wherever any chance of conversion existed, the argument was pushed home either by Senator Hanna himself or by some assistant, such as Senator Kittridge. The campaign for a successful vote was planned as carefully as was the campaign preceding an important popular election.

In his "Four Centuries of the Panama Canal" Mr. Willis Fletcher Johnson says (p. 128): "The result was generally regarded as doubtful until the vote was actually taken. That incident occurred on June 19, 1902, when the measure [the Spooner amendment] was adopted by the overwhelming vote of sixty-seven to six." This is misleading. The final vote did stand sixty-seven to six; but the comparative strength of the two parties had in the meantime been tested by a series of preliminary votes on various attempts to emasculate or modify the Spooner amendment. When these votes involved a decisive question, Panama usually won by about forty-two to thirtyfour. The minority was composed for the most part of Democrats, but included such Republican Senators as Clapp, Hawley, Nelson, Penrose, Thomas Platt and Quay. On the other hand some half a dozen Democrats voted with the majority. The overwhelming final vote merely meant that, after being beaten, the Senators in favor of Nicaragua did not want to go on record against some kind of a canal. But a change of four votes would a few minutes earlier have at least temporarily defeated

the Spooner amendment. The House of Representatives cheerfully agreed to the action of the Senate, and public opinion, which a few months before had not seriously considered Panama, accepted the decision without question. Neither has any doubt since been raised that the selection of the southern route saved the government from committing a grave error and sustaining a severe loss.

The incident constituted the most conspicuous single illustration of Senator Hanna's personal prestige. In this as in so many other cases he succeeded in decisively influencing the course of public policy because he deserved to succeed. Like other Americans he himself had first been predisposed in favor of Nicaragua; but his mind was open and his predisposition did not prevent him from making a thorough study of the question and reaching a proper conclusion. Once having done so, he carefully and deliberately qualified himself to convert Congress to his own decision. That was what he intended to do and that was what he did. He succeeded in doing it, not merely because he had mastered the subject and could speak with authority, but because his personality itself inspired confidence. On no other occasion did he exhibit so clearly and effectively in public the quality and the power, which account for his influence in private over his friends and associates. His Senatorial colleagues had come to trust in his personal good faith; and this trust permitted him to exert a decisive influence on a question which, momentous as it was, had not become seriously entangled in party politics and did not arouse sectional or class interests. The comparatively open mind which Senators and Congressmen brought to the consideration of the question offered an opportunity for an earnest and competent and trustworthy man to impose his selection on a sufficient number of his colleagues. Mark Hanna had made himself the man to seize the opportunity, and his country may well thank him, not only for what he did, but for being the kind of man who could do it.

CHAPTER XXV

1

THE CIVIC FEDERATION AND THE LABOR PROBLEM

In the foregoing chapter we have seen that Senator Hanna's increasing personal power in and outside of Congress had brought with it a higher and broader sense of responsibility. The limitations which he had imposed upon his early behavior in the Senate were abandoned. He began to interfere in the discussion of a far larger range of public questions; and whenever he interfered he advocated not a sectional or a class, but what he believed to be a national, policy. He was no longer the representative to the same extent of merely a business interest in politics. He proposed to represent the whole country, and his power could not have increased as it did unless an increasing number of people had been convinced of the good faith of his intentions and his peculiar ability to make them good.

It is by no means accidental, consequently, that just when his personal political power was becoming nationalized in its expression, he became vitally interested in the better solution of the most critical national economic problem - the problem, that is, of the relation between capital and labor. This problem was fundamental from Senator Hanna's point of view, because all his economic ideas were based upon his personal experience as a productive agent and his political experience as the representative of certain productive agencies in American society. The equitable distribution and the abundant consumption of the economic product were supposed to take care of themselves - provided the productive agencies could be made to work efficiently, actively and harmoniously. He had in his own opinion contributed effectively to their active and efficient operation by helping to protect them against injurious political agitation; but the plain fact was that they did not work harmoniously. Capital and labor were in a condition of more or less constant warfare; and this warfare diminished the efficiency of the pro